Wading through coloniality: critical processes for re/thinking body, place, space, speech, and tongue

Our entire existence in modernity on this earth is warped by coloniality. As Goulet and colleagues (2011) remind us, colonization is not a historical object, but rather an ongoing and living structure meted out via “relationships of power and privilege that have been constructed historically through many means, including war, law, policy, theoretical constructs, and the media, to name a few” (p. 90). Each day we are bathed in the structure of coloniality to the point where our mundane rituals as people on this planet are laced with the violence of colonialism. We are reminded of a letter that each of us has encountered at various points in our own educator preparation processes titled An Indian Father’s Plea. In this letter, Robert Lake (Medicine Grizzlybear) (1990) who was an Associate Professor at Gonzaga University at the time of publication, writes to his son [Wind-Wolf’s] teacher about the abilities his son possesses and how judging his achievement through Western society’s standards works to construct his child as deficient. Existing always in the past, present, and future of colonial space-time continuums render the lives of those existing outside the bounds of coloniality as always, already lacking. Lake’s (1990) letter has always represented a clear visual of how colonial processes take form in educational settings in ways that feel natural and appropriate but are exposed for their harm when critically interrogated. An excerpt from Lake’s (1990) letter that helps to better situate how we enter this editorial reads as follows:

While you are trying to teach him your new methods, helping him learn new tools for self-discovery and adapt to his new learning environment, he may be looking out the window as if daydreaming. Why? Because he has been taught to watch and study the changes in nature. It is hard for him to make the appropriate psychic switch from the right to the left hemisphere of the brain when he sees the leaves turning bright colors, the geese heading south, and the squirrels scurrying around for nuts to get ready for a harsh winter. In his heart, in his young mind, and almost by instinct, he knows that this is the time of year he is supposed to be with his people gathering and preparing fish, deer meat, and native plants and herbs, and learning his assigned tasks in this role. He is caught between two worlds, torn by two distinct cultural systems.

In Wind-Wolf’s classroom, there was no room for a childhood and a child’s learning process that existed outside the frame of a Western colonial way of being. Prior to any real engagement with Wind-Wolf’s identity as an indigenous person who is a direct target of coloniality, his teacher already classified him as incapable of learning—at least in the ways and at the pace of his peers. Shahjahan (2015) provides insights on the ways our pace is dictated by coloniality, arguing that “we must reconceptualize and move beyond Eurocentric notions of time that colonize our academic lives” (p. 489). Wind-Wolf possessed worlds of knowledge, yet because he was not able to gain an orientation to a new world (knowledge) at an arbitrary pace of coloniality, he was rendered as a mind and body out of s/pace with his peers, a slow learner. In thinking through the totality of Wind-Wolf’s experience and particularly the description shared above, we ask ourselves: What is required of educational researchers and practitioners to engage in anticolonial methods and practices while seeking equity and justice with the logics of colonialism clouding our line of sight?

Writing from lands now referred to as the United States of America (U.S.)—a re/naming that came about and continues to come about from great violences: committed against indigenous peoples; Africans forcibly brought to these lands as chattel slaves; and immigrants, asylees, and refugees who make their way here for a myriad of reasons—we acknowledge the centrality of colonialism to the literal structuring of our bodies, places, spaces, speeches, and tongues. In other words, we enter this issue of Equity & Excellence in Education with an unwavering commitment to meaningfully wade through colonial processes, understanding the ways these processes quite literally structure the everydayness of our schools and societies, and, perhaps most importantly, our very being/s. We understand that engaging in anticolonial work must “be seen as a universally shared responsibility that is necessary but insufficient, as locating these genealogies do not directly address the repatriation of land and alterations to material conditions” (Patel, 2014, p. 360). While coloniality takes on different manifestations, we know that within the U.S. the specific colonial logic is ordered under the guise of settler colonialism (Calderon, 2014, p. 82). As Tuck and Yang (2012) note, “the horizons of the settler colonial nation-state are total and require a mode of total appropriation of Indigenous life and land, rather than the selective expropriation of profit-producing fragments” (p. 5). How might educators working for equity against and beyond a variety of oppressions think through settler colonial logics, understanding the way such structure frames the entirety of our existence—and thus, framing the entirety of our work.

In relation to education, Stovall (2018) notes that U.S. schooling, as an institution, “primarily rewards students for order and compliance, which should also be considered part and parcel of the larger projects of settler colonialism and white supremacy/racism” (p. 51). Thinking back to the story of Wind-Wolf, the ways his cultural practices break the neat lines of colonial complicity work to punish him via marginalization and exclusion, all under the guise of non-compliance. How might schools and educators wade through colonial compliance in a way that allows them to explicitly name harm and build counterstructures that work against said harm? Here, we think of concepts of fugitivity put forth by educational scholars that speak to running to something rather than running from (Player et al., 2020; Stovall, 2020). In the case of settler colonialism, our goal is to think about equity as a fierce running to and creation of new s/paces that are grounded in anticolonial methods. While we situate this issue in an overarching frame of working against coloniality, we understand such structure as networked with other socio-structural regimes that work separate and in tandem to create and sustain violent social hierarchies. Thus, we are aligned with Tuck and Yang (2018) in their assertion that “there is no legitimacy to the field of education if it cannot meaningfully attend to social contexts, historical and contemporary structures of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and antiblackness” (p. 5). The authors in this issue are attentive to various oppressive structures that work in service to the larger project of white settler supremacy, including topics such as: racial hierarchies within voluntourism, racialized assaultive speech, anti-Black racism, native youth school pushout, and remedial-oriented raciolinguistic ideologies.

As we attempt to write this editorial and do justice to the true process of thinking with and through anticolonial practices, we understand that we do so from a privileged space that is only present and sustained by the logics of colonialism—an academic journal that desires to communicate with the people, but that publishes articles that are structurally guarded behind paywalls and made a necessity for academics to get ahead or to be successful. So, as we enter this issue as people who occupy and are settled on stolen lands (Tuck & Yang, 2012), we ask ourselves: What is the im/possibility of truly being about the work of destroying the world (and thus destroying ourselves) that colonialism created when we ourselves have been doused by the blood of colonialism? We do not purport to be all-knowing scholars of coloniality. Rather, we purport to be critical educational scholars who look to the critical knolwedges and processes of/for resistance that are birthed from historically marginalized communities to fight against inequity. We understand the ongoing and ever-present structure of colonialism as a key organizer of inequity in our world/s, making the need for us and you, the reader, to commit to actively working against colonialism in every facet of our/your scholarly work and personal lives and positioning it as a non-negotiable equity imperative.

This issue features scholarship enacting critical processes for re/thinking body, place, space, speech, and tongue across a variety of school and societal geographies. This issue begins with a Kitchen-Table Talk conversation, ““Relinking Back to Community”: A Kitchen-Table Talk on Decolonization of Body, Place, Space, Speech, and Tongue,” among Kristyn Lue, Hadiyyah Kuma, Kaitlind Peters, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, Sandy Grande, Davianna McGregor, and K. Wayne Yang. The Kitchen-Table Talk is followed by a poem in the For the Culture section by Sara Field, titled This Poem is Liberatory Praxis.

In “Decolonising Higher Education: The Academic’s Turn,” Saloshna Vandeyar engages in a qualitative case study to examine the ways South African academics respond to various calls across the country to decolonize Universities, methods, and ideas. In “Listening in Multiple Registers for Post-Anthropocentric Education: Attuning to More-than-Human Worlds through Walking with Sound and Smell,” Jane Merewether, Brad Gobby, and Mindy Blaise make a case for extending concepts of justice in education beyond the human through the lens of a walking-with methodology with young children in south-western Australia. In “Learning to Enact Canadian Exceptionalism: The Failure of Voluntourism as Social Justice Education,” Leila Angod draws on data gathered in Canada and South Africa with girls attending an elite Canadian girls school to interrogate the ways voluntourism contributes to the aims of the white settler state. In “Feeling Black: Black Urban High School Youth and Visceral Geographies of Anti-Black Racism,” DeMarcus Jenkins leverages geographical theories to understand the experiences of Black students at a majority Latinx high school, particularly their experiences with anti-Black racism and how these moments were embodied. In “A Critical Race Theory Perspective of Assaultive Speech in U.S. Campus Communities,” LaWanda Ward’s theoretical piece uses a critical race theory analysis to examine two U.S. Supreme Court Cases often used to defend assaultive speech on college campuses and urging institutions to refuse white legal logic that works to protect hate speech. In ““False Positives, Reentry Programs, and Long Term Englis Learners”: Undoing Dichotomous Frames in U.S. Language Education Policy” Nelson Flores and Mark Lewis engage in a genealogical tracing of the assumptions that go into bilingual students being divided into English Learners who get extra support and non-English Learners who are not entitled to extra language support.

In ““You Take the Punches:” Native Youth Experiences of School Pushout,” Katie Johnston-Goodstar, LeVi Boucher, and Megan Red Shirt-Shaw document a decolonial Youth Participatory Action Research project that investigates Native-specific school pushout practices that they refer to as “punches,” which led them to developing strategies to address this injustice rooted in dispossession and harm. In “Snatching Bodies, Snatching History/ies: Exhuming the Insidious Plundering of Black Cemeteries as a Curriculum of Postmortem Racism,” Bretton Varga, Mark E. Helmsing, Cathryn van Kessel, and Rebecca C. Christ explore implications of postmodern racism on curriculum studies through an exploration of body snatching (the theft of Black bodies and the pillaging of Black cemeteries), connecting it to white-settler onto-epistemologies that educational research is situated within. Lastly, in “Invisible Currents of Power Course Beneath the Surface of Our Rivers,” Stewart Manley uses fictional poetry and personal reflection in their creative submission to discuss three fictional characters tangled within various currents of power (historical, cultural, and geo-poetical) to describe the ways power affects people and communities around the world.